Bill Keys finds a new neighbor settled across the short road to his mine. A feud over a road turns into a story of signs and suspicion, a courtroom and a prison, and a pardon that doesn't clear him. Much of it rests on one man's word.
A piece of cardboard on a stake, in the middle of a desert road. "Keys, this is my last warning. Stay off my property." May eleventh, nineteen forty-three. Bill Keys had driven that road for three decades, because it ran to his mine and going around meant ten miles of bad ground. Worth Bagley had settled across it, a former Los Angeles deputy the other deputies feared. His new wife didn't know she was number nine. He shot a Keys burro, handed the law his wife's gun as his own, and told her to keep quiet. He posted signs, Beware of Gun Traps. She never saw a trap, but her friends quit visiting. "If I ever catch him alone without any witnesses," he told her, "I will get rid of the old goat." The rest you mostly get on Keys's word, and a Park Service historian calls that record a minefield. Keys said Bagley came over the rise and fired, no words spoken. Keys took his rifle from the car and fired three times. Bagley fell at the third. Keys never went to him. He went to his well, fitted a magneto, and pumped water for two hours. He went home and ate. Then he drove to Twentynine Palms and gave himself up. He was sixty-three. The jury said manslaughter. San Quentin, prisoner seventy-one four oh seven. His wife, Frances, sold the cattle to pay the lawyers. They offered him parole more than once, the story goes, if he'd say he was wrong. He stayed. "I didn't regret San Quentin 'cause that was my college," he said. In nineteen forty-eight his friends found Bagley's ex-wife, the one told to keep quiet. She talked. The pardon came in nineteen fifty-six, and it didn't clear him. The state said the record fell short on self-defense, and pardoned him for his conduct, age and wish to vote. It reached the ranch in a tube. They were sitting under the pine tree. "Here, mother," he said. She adjusted her glasses and read it to him. "There it is, Dad!" He'd already written his own verdict. Back from prison, he chiseled a stone and set it where Bagley fell. "Here is where Worth Bagly bit the dust at the hand of W F Keys." He left the E out of the man's name. He'd studied in the prison library, and I've never been sure that was an accident.
Photo: NPS / Lian Law · Public domain (NPS staff photo)